How can companies engage employees in sustainability during difficult economic times?

When money is tight, businesses tend to focus on very short-term financial goals, making it more difficult to engage people around longer-term sustainability goals. One participant suggested two strategies to deal with short-termism leading to financial myopia:

1. If you look hard enough you can find the evidence to build a compelling business case for sustainability.

2. Ensure there is business clarity and leadership around your medium and long-term vision and goals.

Instead of engaging employees in more abstract or distant aspects of sustainability, it may be necessary to make the message resonate closer to home. Focusing on the individual employee and how sustainability directly contributes to their health and wellbeing, such as fishery depletion or local pollution problems, may be more engaging. Look for ways to make abstract ideas more tangible, e.g. a company gave their employees energy monitors for their homes, which then helped them to better understand energy conservation in work.

What is important when first starting an employee engagement scheme?

One delegate suggested limiting choice and nudging employees in to more sustainable behaviour. For example, no bins, automatic double sided printing, moving the printer to another floor and using incentives to encourage people to turn off their computers. Start with small changes such as these to give employees immediate control then move onto bigger things.

Employee engagement schemes should be first and foremost well thought out; set your outcomes based on what you want to achieve, then structure a program around that.

What is key to ensuring employee participation?

• Make the scheme relevant to an employees specific skill sets

• Transparency

• Effective communication

• Incentives

• An element of fun and fulfilment

• Make it measurable KPI's

• Inspiring leadership

How can you keep employee engagement schemes fresh?

Generally everyone agreed that employee engagement schemes needed to be radically re-thought as it often feels that schemes have a 'been there, done that' feel about them.

Employee volunteering schemes face issues when they are not communicated effectively or reviewed at regular intervals. The programme saw 98% employee awareness of the scheme after 10 years, with exceptional take up over that time but it has not been reviewed or refreshed and is now viewed more as a 'chore'.

Generally there tends to be fairly low attendance on free volunteering days and often they require further co-ordination across different parts of the organisation to ensure that employee skill sets are taken into account.

What unexpected 'wins' have you experienced when bringing your sustainability strategy to life for employees?

One delegate reflected on how an internal competition they had run to capture good ideas for improving sustainability had surprised him – some of ideas that appeared as 'small stuff' actually represented the micro-level knowledge of specific staff and the insight they had into waste in their particular area. One suggestion to stop printing and circulating to the entire business a particular report that was no longer used generated an annual saving of £70,000. Responding to and acknowledging employee suggestions is vitally important. If someone makes the effort to input their ideas then prompt feedback will encourage them and others to make more suggestions in future.

Getting senior leadership engaged behind your company sustainability strategy is vitally important. If the person at the top doesn't get sustainability it becomes much more difficult to engage the rest of the organisation. Tactics suggested to do this include:

• Use peer pressure and industry networks – organise a meeting between your leader and a cross-sector peer that is championing sustainability.

• Frame it in a way they will understand, eg money, risk, compliance.

• Engage the investment community to highlight the importance of sustainability to senior leadership.

• Look into executive education.

One company has created an internal competition between departments based on who can make the most progress in becoming more sustainable. Public recognition is given to the best performance.

Another delegate highlighted the simple 'wins' you can get from explaining the full narrative around sustainability to people, from the impact of climate change and resource scarcity to what this means for the company and even their department. Doing this in a discussion or a workshop format is particularly effective.

How can social media be best used to engage employees around sustainability?

One delegate suggested that employees may not want their work-life impinging on their personal Facebook page or Twitter feed. However, the opportunity to represent the company to the world as an 'expert' can be highly motivating to an employee. Managing this in a way that maximises authenticity and transparency while minimising reputational risks is key.

Other suggestions included encouraging employees to tweet or post competition entries through social media and using online tools designed for internal communications.

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